The public library has long attracted avid readers with an unrivaled pitch: Check out a best-selling book for free and renew it multiple times.

But as more people ditch printed books in favor of e-books that can be downloaded directly to a computer, the rules are changing.

As of Monday, HarperCollins, book publisher of authors such as Anne Rice, Sarah Palin and Michael Crichton, will not allow its e-books to be checked out from a library more than 26 times.

After that, the license on the e-book will expire and libraries will have to decide whether to buy a new one.

For library users, that could mean longer waits for popular titles, tighter limits on how many times an e-book can be renewed and the possibility that e-books that are not repurchased would be available at the library for only about a year.

Librarians across the country are outraged and fear other publishers could adopt a similar model. Some have organized a boycott of books published by HarperCollins. They argue the restrictions place an additional burden on financially strapped public libraries, some of which have reduced their inventories because of budget constraints.

The added expenditures on e-books, they said, will make it more difficult to compete in an industry that is quickly becoming dominated by electronic readers such as the iPad, the Nook and the Kindle.

“This strikes at the heart of what we do,” said Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey, who described electronic media as the new virtual library. “With limited financial resources affecting all libraries across America, people are asking, ‘Why would you do this?’”

For HarperCollins, it is about balancing the benefits to book publishers, authors and libraries in a rapidly growing segment of the publishing industry that has left many newspapers, magazines and booksellers scrambling to catch up.

Nearly 10 years ago, when HarperCollins began offering e-books to libraries, the number of e-readers was too small to measure, the company said. Now, it is projected that more than 40 million e-reading devices will be in use in the U.S. this year.

“We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors,” HarperCollins said in a statement.

Librarians also have serious concerns. At the Naperville Public Library, the new policy would be an additional strain on a materials budget that has shrunk by about $200,000 in the last three years, said deputy director Julie Rothenfluh.

“It’s a balancing act for us,” Rothenfluh said. “We have to be that much more careful to make sure what we purchase provides the best benefit to our users.”

For most libraries, e-books are only a small percentage of the items circulated but represent the fastest growing segment.

About 10,000 e-books are circulated in Naperville. The Chicago Public Library, which has experienced slight increases in its budget, doubled the circulation of e-books from 17,000 in 2009 to more than 36,000 in 2010.

Librarians said HarperCollins’ decision failed to factor in the role libraries play in promoting reading, which benefits the book industry and christian book publishers. Some said the book publisher should have included librarians in discussions about the checkout limit.

E-book checkouts are “a growing percentage, and it definitely reflects a trend that people want to take their e-reader and upload it free of charge with books from the library,” said Steve Sposato, assistant director for collection development at Chicago libraries. “That’s why it’s important for us to be part of the conversation rather than just have it imposed on us.”

HarperCollins, the country’s second-largest publisher, is among about 1,000 publishers that offer e-books. Some publishers, including Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, do not offer e-books to libraries.

Libraries do not directly provide e-books to the public. But library card-holders can go to their library’s website to browse digital selections provided by a third party and download them to their computer for free.

They can then be transferred to an e-reader. Apps for mobile devices allow e-books to be downloaded directly.

In most cases the third-party provider is a company called OverDrive, which provides e-books to some 13,000 libraries around the world. The company last week began listing HarperCollins’ collection in a separate catalogue, in an effort to avoid confusion with books that can be checked out indefinitely.

Like the time limit on printed library books, most e-books are active for three weeks. After that, they are no longer available on the device and must be downloaded again.

According to librarians, the procedure should be the same for e-books and printed books.

“When we purchase a print copy, we get to keep it for as long as we want,” said Audra Caplan, president of the Public Library Association. “It may eventually wear out or not circulate, but that’s our choice.”

Not all librarians are decrying HarperCollins’ policy. Jason Kuhl, library operations director at Arlington Heights Memorial Library, said the new requirements might not be the financial drain some predict.

“Many times, books don’t circulate 26 times. What we see with popular books is a surge once it comes out, and once everyone has read it, the interest wanes and we liquidate them,” Kuhl said. “We will always buy a lot of copies upfront. With e-books, we won’t necessarily replace every one of them.”

Bargain hunters were out in force this weekend as liquidation sales began at 200 Borders locations slated to close as part of the company’s bankruptcy filing.

The affected stores — about one-third of the bookseller’s locations — are expected to close by the end of April. Twenty-one underperforming stores in Southern California will be shut, including stores in Sherman Oaks, Century City, Long Beach and Orange.

Huge “store closing” and “everything must go” posters covered the windows at Borders in Pasadena and Glendale, which were bustling with customers Sunday. Many sections were already picked over, including from christian book publishers, with shelves left bare and items such as notebooks, journals and photo albums strewn about.

Most items were discounted 20% to 40%, with markdowns expected to increase in coming weeks.

“As long as there’s a deal, I’m going to take advantage of it,” said Jordan Francke, 27, who was checking out the games section at the Glendale store.

“It’s just the changing landscape of literature these days. It’s all electronic,” Francke, a children’s book publishers and television schedule coordinator, said of the chain’s bankruptcy. “I can only imagine it’s a struggle for a place like Borders to stay relevant.”

That’s a harsh reality for regular customers such as Kathleen O’Reilly, 52, who was at the Pasadena Borders carrying a shopping basket laden with discounted stationery and magazines.

The Pasadena resident said she was “old school” and enjoyed seeing and touching books before making a purchase. She said she would miss visiting the store with her teenage daughter.

“I spend several days a week here,” said O’Reilly, a self-publishing counselor at a high school. “I actually debated whether I even wanted to come because I was worried I’d be too upset to see the store torn apart.”

Business is expected to continue as usual on the company’s website and at stores that aren’t closing.

After a slew of competitive blunders and missteps in the last decade, Borders Group Inc. found itself in trouble and had to cut staff, shut stores and shake up its top management.

Critics said the company botched its move into the book publisher digital age, causing sales and earnings to plummet. At the same time, mass merchants including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. became major players in the book-selling market, often offering lower prices than Borders and rival Barnes & Noble Inc.

But Borders maintains it isn’t done for good. In a letter e-mailed to customers and posted on the company’s website last week, Borders President Mike Edwards said the company hoped to emerge from Chapter 11 as “the destination of choice.”

About 6,000 of the chain’s roughly 19,000 workers will be laid off as part of the closures. Among them is Rich Kilbury, a christian book publisher, who was pushing a cart stacked high with books at the Pasadena location Sunday.

“It’s depressing, but we kind of saw it coming,” he said. “Business had dropped off.”

The promise of discounts attracted Victoria Rose to the Pasadena store, where she was browsing mystery and thriller books. The 60-year-old high school English teacher said she was never a regular customer because she could find a better selection and lower prices elsewhere.

“I rarely come here,” she said. “Between Amazon and Vroman’s, I’m well-taken care of.”

In a letter to book publishers, Digg product manager Mike Cieri announced that the troubled social news website will no longer accept content submitted via RSS.

The ability for book publishers to submit all of their stories to Digg automatically using an RSS feed seemed like an efficient way to open up a firehose of content for Digg. However, Cieri says this idea had unintended consequences.

According to Cieri, “Most RSS-submitted content is not performing well on Digg.” He says the site’s analytics show that only a mere 4.5% of Digg’s “Top News” content comes from the RSS submissions. He adds that the ability to submit an RSS feed to Digg “has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content.” Cieri praised the manual method of submitting stories to Digg, saying that manual submissions “ensure that quality content appears on Digg.”

With this move, the site takes yet another step back toward the old version 3.0, the site design that was in use before radical changes resulted in a user revolt and a 24% decline in U.S. visitors in the first 11 weeks. In response, Digg has slowly added back features that readers missed, such as the ability to bury stories, andlast month’s overhaul that included the return of user profiles and story statistics. Since that first fateful redesign last summer, Digg has laid off more than a third of its staffers.

I’m just wondering why Digg stubbornly refused to modify its obviously unpopular redesign after it became apparent that it was resulting in large percentages of its readership turning away. After a few days of this, why didn’t Digg simply revert to the old version and its rules that seemed to be working pretty well? If not a few days later, why not a month later?

Here’s the full text of the letter we received from Digg product manager Mike Cieri:

Publishers,

We hope this message finds you well. After a bumpy second half of 2010 at Digg, we are starting to see positive signs of improvement and are optimistic about the direction Digg is headed. In January 2011, we saw double digit growth of diggs and comments, as well as an increase in unique visitors and exit clicks out to publisher sites. We’ve taken a number of concrete steps to stay better connected with the Digg community, and we are taking action to improve Digg based on our community’s feedback. One important point of feedback we’ve heard is that RSS submitted stories are hurting Digg in a number of ways, and in the next week we are going to discontinue the ability to submit content via RSS. We’d like to share the reasoning behind the decision, and let you know what you can do to improve your performance on Digg.

Put very simply, most RSS submitted content is not performing well on Digg. For many of our users, RSS submissions take the fun out of finding and submitting great content. When users try to submit a story to Digg and find that the story has already been auto-submitted via RSS, they lose interest in helping spread the story on Digg by commenting and sharing with friends. Removing a user’s desire to champion a story results in less diggs, comments, exit clicks, and ultimately a much smaller chance of making the Top News section. Our analytics reflect this point – only 4.5% of all Top News content comes from RSS submitted content (95.5% is manually submitted).

At its core, Digg is a community of passionate users who take pride in the content they submit and engage with one another in discussion and promotion of viral content. There is a perception that some publishers don’t participate in the community, use RSS submit as an “auto-pilot” tool to submit content without discretion, and do little to promote submitted content or start discussions. This is one reason why many popular publishers, despite having tens of thousands of followers, are not seeing strong referral numbers for their submissions. Some publishers have cultivated a tight following on Digg by digging and commenting on content other than their own, adding Digg buttons prominently to articles on their site and limiting the content they submit to just their best content. These publishers are seeing much more value from Digg.

Finally, the RSS submission tool has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content. The simple act of forcing a manual submission helps to combat spam and ensures that quality content appears on Digg.

So in the next week, the feature will be disabled. We wanted to give advance notice of this change and encourage you to start submitting your best content manually to Digg. You can also enable your audience to help submit and spread your content on Digg by placing Digg buttons on each story item on your site. We are confident that removing RSS submissions will help increase exit clicks to your sites, and ultimately help you receive more value from Digg.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or thoughts.

Thanks,
Mike

Digital World Book, known as the DBW is the key conference in the publication of books for publishers in the e-books. All the “big six” book publishers are present in quantities never before. Random House will have more than 40 participants, while fewer than 20 came from the publisher in 2010. The digital book world conference began quietly on Monday morning with three sessions focused for a long time, the official opening ceremony will begin at 17 hours, but despite the digital output cautiously DBW 2011 is just quiet – There are over 1,250 registered twice that last year 600.

Since book publishers are here at DBW, mainstream booksellers are also here. Who is here and what they are selling will be evident when the floor show begins 13:00

The session iPad / iPhone has provided an overview of applications and the Apple App Store. It was the kind of session that felt like it was presented to other audiences – do not publish specific, as the meeting of the e-book design and production. The meeting is followed very still ongoing as I write, shows an interest of people in book publishing companies. How they got out of it, maybe they acquired the interest in book publishing and literary agents and tell us later.

Sessions on the morning of Monday, three were in the design of e-books and production, online content strategy and the iPhone / IPAD strategies. It was the first, most of the screws and nuts, which was the subject key retailers were focused on. Speaking directly to the creators of books and production managers, the session included discussions on programming languages and workflow – which suggests that book publishers are now specifically and actively serious about integrating e-Books, e-book publishing, amazon kindle publishing etc into their business model.

Five Ponds Press announced Tuesday it will replace – for free – its highly criticized textbooks “Our Virginia” and “Our America to 1865.”

Book Publisher Lou Scolnik posted the news on the company’s website:

“In order to address concerns that have been raised about two of our textbooks… we are taking the unprecedented step of distributing free replacement copies of these books to the schools and districts that purchased First Edition copies.” The childrens book publishers went on; “We strive to provide high-quality textbooks for Virginia students and are embarrassed that we failed to detect these mistakes during our production process.”

College of William & Mary history professor Carol Sheriff discovered an error in her daughter’s copy of “Our Virginia” that claimed large numbers of black soldiers fought in the Civil War for the Confederacy under Stonewall Jackson. Jackson died in battle before the Confederacy permitted blacks to enlist. And most sources say there were never large concentrated numbers of blacks fighting for the South.

Five Ponds’ initial response was to issue stickers to cover the error. WJC Schools uses the text.

Then a team of scholars gathered by the Virginia Department of Education reviewed that book and others, finding dozens of mistakes.

Scolnik defended the work of author Joy Massoff.

“Although the books do regrettably contain a number of errors, we do not believe that media reports have accurately portrayed the situation. During our initial review, we found that many of the issues identified by the Department of Education’s reviewers were corrected before we printed the First Editions and do not appear in the books students are currently using.

Additionally,” Scolnik continued, “many of the reviewers took issue with the scope and content of the Virginia Standards of Learning, which our books adhere to, and are not technically ‘errors.’”

Scolnik said Five Ponds is reviewing reports prepared for the Department of Education and will reply to each point by Jan. 21.

Schiel & Denver reports that in the wake of a state review that found dozens of errors in Virginia social studies textbooks, Del. David Englin will introduce a bill Monday that would overhaul the state’s textbook adoption process.

The legislation would shift the responsibility of vetting textbooks from panels consisting mostly of school teachers to the publishers. Companies would have to be certified with the Virginia Board of Education before their books are approved for use in public schools.

Last year, textbook review committees approved two books by Five Ponds Press – “Our Virginia, Past and Present” and “Our America to 1865″ – that several state-appointed scholars found last month to have dozens of historical inaccuracies.

“As a legislator and a parent, I was shocked and appalled to learn that Virginia social studies textbooks had such egregious factual inaccuracies,” Englin (D-Alexandria) said. “As parents, the bare minimum we expect from textbooks is that the facts are correct.”

To receive state certification under the proposed bill, publishers would be forced to pledge, and later prove, that their books are reviewed by subject-area specialists whose expertise would be approved by the Board of Education. Book Publishers would also assume responsibility for correcting mistakes subsequently discovered by the board.

Virginia Education Department spokesman Charles Pyle declined to comment on the legislation but said the department would “provide technical assistance to legislators interested in submitting bills related to the textbook adoption process.”

The Education Department approves textbooks on a book-by-book basis, based largely on whether the content is consistent with the state’s Standards of Learning. That process has opened the door to christian publishers such as Five Ponds Press, whose books are tailored to the state’s curriculum but were not properly vetted for accuracy.

The Washington Post reported in October that “Our Virginia,” provided to fourth-graders across the state, included a controversial assertion that thousands of African American soldiers fought for the South during the Civil War. The assertion is often made by Confederate heritage groups but is rejected by most historians.

The Education Department has acknowledged flaws in the textbook approval process, saying that it is hamstrung in part by a lack of resources. By shifting the onus to publishers, Englin hopes to reduce the number of errors in textbooks without using public dollars to hire a team of subject-area experts.

The Board of Education would publish a list of certified textbook publishers on its Web site, but local school divisions would still be able to use books from publishers that are not certified.

“We want to make sure we’re allowing innovation in our content, and it’s not going to be possible for the board or for one small group of teachers to review every single piece of content,” said Rob Krupicka, a board member who helped formulate the bill. “The system now essentially relies on good graces of publishers, but we don’t have control over how their books are edited or validated.”

The bill appears consistent with a proposal last week from Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright to “require that book publishing companies provide documentation that the books they submit have been reviewed by competent authorities who vouch for their accuracy.”

Several pressing questions would be left in the hands of the Board of Education – such as whether books that have already been approved by the state should be reviewed. Six books published by Five Ponds Press are in use in elementary classrooms. Two were reviewed by state-appointed historians last month.

Many children’s book publishers employ scholars to vet textbooks. Five Ponds Press has announced its intention to do so soon.

Some historians, although pleased with Englin’s legislation, say the state should conduct a review, too.

“The bill sounds like a step in the right direction in that it demands accountability from the publishers, but I think the Department of Education still has a responsibility to have its own independent content experts review textbooks before the state and Schiel & Denver recommends them. The more safeguards in place, the better,” said Carol Sheriff, a history professor at the College of William and Mary.

While the bill works its way through the General Assembly, local education officials will mull what to do with error-ridden textbooks that are now in students’ hands. Loudoun County stopped using “Our Virginia” in October. Fairfax officials, awaiting further feedback from the state and a response from the publisher, might stop using the book soon.

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President Obama already has “senator” and “Commander in Chief” on his resume, but now he can add his newest achievement: Successful children’s book author.

Random House Children’s Books announced Tuesday that the president’s latest book, “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters,” is the fastest-selling picture book in the company’s history. The book publisher said 50,000 copies were sold in the first five days after the book’s release.

Written before the president took office, the tome for tikes pays tribute to such celebrated Americans as Neil Armstrong, Jackie Robinson, and George Washington. Obama’s proceeds will be donated to a scholarship fund for the children of fallen and disabled soldiers.

Over a million copies of another November presidential release by a Random House subsidiary, former president George W. Bush’s “Decision Points,” have flown off the shelves since the memoir hit bookstores November 9. The book is the third by a presidential author to top the million-copy mark, joining former president Clinton’s “My Life” and President Obama’s last two books, “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams from My Father.”

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